Ken cuccinelli is back with us served as the department of Homeland Security for the trump and is now serving as the Election Transparency Initiative. What is the Election Transparency Initiative . Guest if thats a good place to start. Sig group we formed less than two years ago to take advantage of frankly the interest on both sides of the aisle andnd electin reform. Having been a state legislator and as an attorney general i can tell you elections another legislators will play the same they are often they left behind subject and all over the country are election laws need updated. Pennsylvania is operating on a 1937 election code. Their words and their election codes almost dont have any meaning today. Last few years we have been encouraging state legislators to open up by which i mean transparency to open up the election system so citizens can see event and every thing except who you voted for and so forth. We believe that kind of transparency and openness combined with basic common a see security is anybody winner confident in the outcome of an election and thats how we l measure success is by systems that are so open andat transpart ande reliable that citizens on all sides can have confidence in the outcome of their election. We saw evidence of that thing shaken in 2020 often by state officials who werent obeying their own laws. You dont pass laws to his obey the last law we pass others in element of reliability there and we havent seen this attention to election systems since bush bee gore in florida in 2000 you will remember. Florida was for three years cleaning up its elections and firing people who were doing a good job and they made major improvements. Ones. Result was that in the roh year for election, 2020 24. The Third Largest state in the largest swing state was done counting its elections reliably with no complaints from either side on elections which if you look around the countryy that night and the following week or two it turned out to be prettyt impressive. Thats our goal with the Election Transparency Initiative. We worked on it in states all over the country and last year we made efforts to make sure washington didnt just frankly take over elections from the state. We believe each state running its owne election system is a form of security itself that i can play that from my days in the department of Homeland Security. Its much more difficult for foreign interlopers if you have several systems rather than one. That threat has been abated currently in we are imposing reform in the states. Bottom line we are better off today than we were two years ago and thats on a bipartisan basis or entirely democratic states like new jersey have passed the transparency improvement but we seen Bipartisan Legislation in pennsylvania and South Carolina virginia louisiana. This is one of those issues that didnt used to be partisan and it would be great if we could get it back to just having conversationss about works best in our states andes communities. The law might open. Democrats 202 7488000 republicans 202 7488001. With us until the end of our program today is election transparency. Org is the web site you can go to to findor out abot the initiative. On the about page oftr that web site at the first paragraph the elections Transparency Initiative is quickly mobilizing coordinator with our Coalition Partners of radical democrats to override laws of like h. R. 1 and h. R. 4 simultaneously working at the state level to achieve meaningful reform. Remind us of what h. R. 1 and h. R. 4 art. They were so far in political history they were in 2021. H. R. 1 was the attempted a complete washington takeover of elections. We would have one set of rules emanating from washington for all states. They would be the same everywhere and they would happily emphasize more of the less secure forms of voting. Male princesses less less secure than inperson voting is found on the Bipartisan Commission run by jimmy carter 17 years ago. And more prone to fraud and slower counting which creates its own problems. We also sought h. R. 1 attempt to connect the dots. R h. R. 1 would have mandated the states to dump all of the explicitly use the word citizen their databases. Keep in mind legal and illegal aliens get drivers licenses and they attend schools. They get Public Health services from their states that they live in and all of those would have been put on the voter rolls. They could have voted without multiunder h. R. 1. It would have eliminated the laws which are, every demographic. Every Party Republicans democrats in the pence libertarians all in poll after poll after poll despite the attacks on its support commonsense voter i. D. To drink we have been Vice President harris in the bet interview last summer and h. R. 1 debate acknowledged it have to be able to identify who you are to vote in a secure system. So it was a big hill and a takeover from washington bill and no matter what the subjecto americans dont tend to take kindly to washington trying to take over with their state can do primarily in 1789. Grade and from southpoint ohio, independent. Good morning. Caller good morning. Itt seems to me an answer lookig for a problem. Everythingin i see on this is so minute. The republicans in florida ive seen them yelling and the republicans this time and youre all upset about it. Republicans this time trying to say theres fall to the election. If it happens again we can and when they first have this country you didnt have to be ao citizen. You had to be a landowner. I just think you are a little out of line. Thank you. It mr. Cuccinelli. Thankfully we have grown past landowner from 240 years ago in america began with the declaration of independence and what Martin Luther king called arlette patrusic be selfevident and all men are created endowed either. Or with certain inalienable rights including life liberty and the pursuit ofy happiness. We have never been perfect about achieving that old but it is still our national goal. Part of this debate is about getting closer and closer their. A phrase we use all the time its easy to vote, hard to cheat. Easy to vote, hard to cheat and its important for people to remember is a former attorney general i can tell you once a bad ballot is in the ballot oxy cant take it out. You dont know what to ballot is yours or mine so even if you identify the problem afterthefact the only solution is that there are no bad ballots in a particular election to ask the judge to rerun the election. That is quite an enormous undertaking to try to do twice. Its hard enough once so its important we secure our elections on the front end with clean voter rolls in people having to identify themselves. Obviously everybody gets to vote once. Only once and we want to make sure everyones vote gets counted. That doesnt seem like too much to ask. The caller was the ring in on republicans and we heard a lot from republicans the last few years but i would say our elections date back to 2000. In all of the president ial elections in 2,002,004 and 2016 it was democrats who are complaining national including people who say such complaints are somehow bad like jaime raskin in congress on the january 6 committee that were complaining and objecting to electors and now all of a sudden the same complaints from the other side are a basis for judgment by those folks. It would be nice to be able to set the partisanship aside as i said early on. If you get 100 americans around they will agree on 75 of what it takes to run a good election. It would be great if we can get back there in the way we wille get back thereul is through the transparency that we emphasize in the election transparency issue transparency so citizens can see every step of every election and every state every step except you voting on the ballot in terms of problems i mentioned 2021 of the biggest problems was stated rituals not following their own laws. This was rampant and i can point to examples in this constant wisconsin michigan pennsylvania. It was all over the country. Its not a reason not to follow the rules. Fairness is not changing the rules in the middle and everybody playing by the same set ofpl rules. In america we call that due process. That is what was somewhat lacking in 2020. We i think we are going to be back to that in the 2022 elections and as i said thereve there have been improvements to transparency and security all over the country on a bipartisan basis. Theres good reason to think our election system is now better in 2022 than it was in 2020. Theres a lot of work yet to do. Host we have 10 minutes end of her program for viewers who want to stick with us on cspan after the program is over will go to the Senate Judiciary hearing their on Data Security featuring twitter executive whistleblower. The reporters are starting to gather and thats where well go after this program. Well take your calls and questions on the Election Transparency Initiative. This is john, you are next thanks for waiting. Caller thanks for taking my call and i believe that everything mr. Cuccinelli just said. Mailin ballots and filling out, pew people filling out incomplete and they need to send the ballots to people to have them corrected. They were illegally counted by the people in the state. H. R. 1 and h. R. 4 these systems are harder to hack. Thank you very much for taking my call. Guest just a comment i said how important is to secure elections on the front end and wisconsin is a good example. Just a couple of months ago, a year and half after the 2020 election the Wisconsin Supreme Court found wisconsins use of drop boxes was completely violative of their law it was a complete violation of wisconsin law. Theres no racism up for them to be used the way they were in wisconsin and across the state and there was a big difference in various jurisdictions. Its a goodns example is our courts are not equipped to quickly judge even criminal cases. Even, every potential fraud vote and this is criminal and opposed to making mistakes which is more common in elections takes weeks and months to investigate. You dont have time for that especially in a president ial election when you have a meeting date for electors six weeks after electionte day. So its a good example of the states own court system finding funding their officials have been violating the law and its bipartisan. It was bipartisan republicans and democrats both were involved in that in the violations of the law. So its so important to get these things right on the front end so when that election and whether we win or lose and ive won and lost races and when i lost i didnt question the outcome. I may not like it but i didnt questionon the outcome because i have sufficient confidence in virginia systemth that an there was easy enough to walk away knowing we lost by mt. Irna new york on the line for democrats, good morning. Caller good morning, how are you . Host good. Im trying to understand why former President Donald Trump committed the highest termination called treason. You commit a crime against your gun permit by trying to overturn an election. Yet he walks free. The punishment for treason is five years in prison. Toplevel life imprisonment. As thats the mr. Cuccinelli . Guest sure treason you can disagree with the man but he wasnt a candidate for president. Candidates are expected meaning our system is built to absorb electionon content. Did it go past the point some people thought it should have ended quetta shura did and thats a pointd . Of continuing debate as well. As a candidate you have a right to be sure they counted everything elseco was done properly in accordance with the rules. We know and i just gave you a wisconsin example we know there were states not following their own laws by their own judgment afterthefact. Me lets not pretend donald trump wasnt angry at nothing. There was a lot for him to be upset about. Does that mean the election should have flipped . Obviously we have a system in place to achieve those outcomes and the outcome was that joe biden was the president and he is today. We now have one of the things that lost him from that is the focus on the conduct of elections the execution of elections and getting them done right and to do that we do needd more openness. For folks with your view and by the way i love hearing this amount for new york in addition to our mouth burning here in virginia, for those who are on thenn side to joe biden side you should want i would suggest a lot of openness instead of saying you dont have the right to look at this, the idea should be open it up so people know themselves the outcome was the accurate one. One of the things that most frustrating on both sides of the islets from either side side tries to shut down the inquiry. I think theat best way to answer which it sounds like you would consider unreasonable about the election is to be more open about them. We have localitiess and states all over the country that are trying to bury the this. We have registrars in wisconsin city clerks who are trying very hard not to answer questions. Why not . The only reason most people usually conclude you dont want to answer questions you are. The answer. Thats position will want to be elections t afterthefact becae we elect is leading our country and our state and our communities, thats the starting point for s the government of te people by the people in it that expression in our election. We need to work for years to come in all the states improve the quality of our voter rolls to make sure people like to buy themselves and only identify themselves and not to overdo that an part of the cheat idea we have that elections transparency. Org. We can achieve it in Court Approved after bush bee gore when things go badly as they did in florida in 2000 they responded correctly. Their legislature they were mortified. They were in paris at how badly it went. There are legislature turned for years to improving their elections and letting people know they were doing the job well and the result was they had dramatically improved elections functions. They acknowledge Governor Desantis has been pushing other reforms in florida. They still had knowledge they have more to do yet the efforts they made following the election did improve. Host Ken Cuccinelli we have to end it there. The Senate Hearing is getting underway on the twitter whistleblower hearing. Thank you for your Time National chair of elections Transparency Initiative at elections transparency. Org